Preface: Welcome to the Electronics Theory course.
This course, in its entirety, was written by Ray Dall. It has taken several years, and is truly a monumental work.
What started out as a series of emails - wound up being a complete online course, and has become the basis of now two published books.

There are several high schools, colleges and technical schools officially using all or portions of this course.
If you want to use this course for a school of some kind, please send an email to the editor
and ask permission.
Comments are also invited. We also would like as many of you as are taking this course to write in, and send in schematics and pictures of projects you may be working on.
We would be more than happy to feature your project and give you all the credit.

I would like to take this moment to say that while electronics is a math intensive science - it needn't be as math intensive as most scholars try to make it. (For those already in the know -I'm not saying that there isn't an order of magnitude between 3dB and 10dB, or between a MHz and a GHz) What I am saying is that we were able to put men on the moon with all the accuracy of a slide-rule, which by the way is only accurate to 1, possibly 2 decimal points. First rough estimation to 2 decimal points (assuming it is correct) is usually all you need to make a circuit function adequately well. In short - while SOME math is necessary - I'll do my best to keep it to a minimum.

Also, this course is provided as a FREE resource. It may be free to you, but it does cost
us to update the site and pay for its presence on the web. If you appreciate the course, please click on
one of our sponsors once in a while, to help us stay online. Besides, you may just find that do-dad you've
been looking for!

Now, on with the course.

Ω

WHAT IS MATTER

(And why does it matter?)

Throughout mankind, we have tried to explain the things we see
around us. This is probably what sets us apart from the apes more
than anything else. While other animals are simply content with the
fact that a rock is a rock and a tree is a tree, we as humans must
investigate and find out WHY a tree grows, and HOW was this rock
formed? At first, man broke things down into various groups.

Along the way someone found they could be broken down into 3
groups:
Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral. This worked fine for
monkeys, which were animal, and trees which were vegetable. Rocks
of course must be mineral. But what is coal? It used to be a
vegetable until it was compressed over time. Now it is a mineral?

Another way of classifying things was found:
Solids,
Liquids and
Gases. This was clearly easy to define. All
substances could be simply looked at, and determined whether it
was a solid or not. Ice is a solid. Water is a liquid. Steam would be
considered a gas. So what then is sunlight? What is magnetism?
What is electricity?

Benjamin Franklin concluded from his many experiments, that
electricity had certain properties, such as pressure, current. He
further concluded that its movement was predictable, like the pouring
of water from one glass to another. From his conclusions, it was
conventionally assumed that while we might not be able to SEE
electricity at work, we could see its effects. And electricity, like unto
water, acted like a fluid in every sense of the word.

So again we pose the question, "What is
MATTER?" And we answer
the question as follows: Matter is the stuff around us.

Scientifically we define matter as all the "material" things about us.
Matter includes all natural and man-made structures, liquids, metals,
gases, etc.; in other words,
everything that has weight and occupies
space.

All matter then takes up space. And anything that takes up space can
be broken down into smaller pieces. A solid block of wood may be
cut into smaller pieces until it is toothpicks, splinters, even sawdust.
A gallon of water can be broken down into quarts, cups, even drops.
But there comes a point where it can be broken down no longer and
still retain its basic properties. In other words, there is a point where
water can get no smaller, and still be water. That point is called the
MOLECULE.

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